German company virtualcitySYSTEMS is the winner of the OGC CityGML Challenge. CTO Claus Nagel joined the award ceremony in Toulouse and presented the prize-winning solution at the OGC Toulouse Meeting last November.
In late October 2019, the Open Geospatial Consortium held their CityGML 3.0 Challenge in Manchester for the first time. It was sponsored by Ordnance Survey, the Manchester City Council and the Triangulum EU project. The aim of this challenge was to develop software solutions that support the upcoming version 3.0 of CityGML. Next to that, the integration of dynamic sensor data was of importance.
City Models as open data
Cities all over the world successfully use CityGML models. Better still, most major cities and national surveys in Germany rely on this OGC standard. They use it for for processing, managing and sharing 3D geodata. North Rhine-Westphalia, Thuringia, Berlin and Hamburg and numerous other cities provide CityGML models as open data.
Read more: 2019 OGC Gardels Award for Linda van den Brink
Finalists
virtualcitySYSTEMS, HFT Stuttgart and Italian company CSI Piemonte were the finalists in the OGC CityGML Challenge in Manchester. The City Council provided a range of datasets including building, terrain and sensor data in formats such as CityGML, Shapefile or GeoJSON. All parties involved developed solutions with a strong commitment. Together they made one thing clear. CityGML models and open standards have great added value over regular visualizations of urban and regional models. Together, they make it possible to present semantic information. Furthermore, the open integration of thematic and planning data will be indispensable in the future.
Intuitive, innovative
virtualcitySYSTEMS convinced the jury with their ‘intuitive 3D web viewer and their innovative solutions for creating’. Above all this, the winning team presented planning scenarios in the city model. They exported CityGML 3.0 to many common 3D formats and edited attributes in real-time. Lastly, virtualcitySYSTEMS showed a solar potential analysis which was conducted and integrated into the model. For the coming year, this application will be publicly available for innovation purposes.
